Most important topic when coding

[Savarak]

I believe it is the Formatting... Formatting is fundamental to understanding code, code logic, and the "divide and conquer" reasoning behind object oriented design... With proper formatting (including commenting of course) you can easily see syntax errors, logic errors, and of course, nice clean and clear code. Anyone agree? disagree? I'm trying to convince a friend who's new to coding to adhere to strict and proper code formatting when he codes his programs... Currently he's struggling because he takes code formatting to be a very low priority. I'd like some more backup to my theory!

 

[j0lly]

I agree.

 

[GigaCluster]

I definitely agree. I religiously indent, and when something goes wrong I can easily see at what "level" the error is. Indentation is the key to successful debugging.

 

[Elledan]

I find commenting even more important than formatting. Not that the latter is not important, but still.

When I'm coding, about 1/5 to 1/10 of all characters are comments, the rest is code. Formatting is done by Editplus

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

Couldn't agree more. If you keep with a strict style (not just commenting; this includes indenting and such), it'll be much easier to spot missing curly brackets or missing commas, or whatever else you f*cked up.

 

[Juniper]

Yup, I totally agree. One of my first lessons in java

 

[kranky]

Agree with all replies. It's hard enough to write complex code, and you just make it harder on yourself if you don't format and comment properly. But a lot of people don't get it until they have to debug something that's more than a few dozen lines of code, that they haven't worked on for a while.

 

[Rallispec]

I think making good comments in your programming is important.









SIKE!!!!!!!!!!!!! i'm the worst at commenting my programs. If anybody needs to figure out what it is doing, they can ask me. It really makes my teachers mad. :disgust:

 

[RSI]

I assumed this was common sense in the computing world. How can someone not know this? To call myself a programmer would insult any current computer science student. And even I understand very well that formatting is extremely important when programming in any language. Take basic HTML, most programmers would not even consider that a "programming language". Yet even with HTML, formatting is essential. Try to edit a page that has been butchered by Notepad (sometimes Notepad screws up php pages when you save them). Impossible! But if you view a nicely formatted page with EditPlus, magically everything is simple and easy to comprehend. I have seen pure PHP code and I've seen plenty of C and C++. I can imagine that the same rules I've observed apply to most (or every) programming language in existence.

Logic rules.. just don't take it to an excessive level.

-RSI

 

[Brutus]

Yup, formatting is vital in coding.

I had a professor who marked a solution wrong because I used an open bracket at the end of a line instead of putting it on the next line i.e.

for (int i; i = 0; i++) {

instead of

for (int i; i = 0; i++)
{

She was teaching Data Structures in C++ and my coding was done by Java conventions. She just wasn't used to seeing it like that...

Brutus